Today Microsoft announced the aquisition of TeamPlain, the brilliant web-frontend for Team Foundation Server, from the company DevBiz. The full press-release can be found here.

TeamPlain solves some of the most common issues people have with Team Foundation Server and its web-frontend (or, rather, lack of it). TeamPlain has a really neat UI that will appeal to the entire team, not only to users outside of Visual Studio (like project managers, business analysts and end-users).

All users with valid client access licenses of Team Foundation Server can download the product here and start using it right away.

The latest release of the Team Foundation Power Tools (v.1.2) is now available for download!

The new features I find most intreresting this time are these:

- a set of check-in policies (custom path policy, forbidden patterns, changeset comments, work item query). Basic stuff really, but things most companies would use so it's nice not to have to write them again .

- Joel Semeniuk Process Template Editor has been integrated into Visual Studio as a DSL tool. The best tool around for managing the hefty set of xml files that defines a VSTS process has been adopted by the company.

TFPT can be downloaded here.

The Process Template Editor requires the Visual Studio DSL toolkit that can be downloaded here.

Virtual PC 2004 has been available for free for a while. Now the updated version (that also support 64-bit windows) is available:

Virtual PC 2007 page:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/default.mspx

The Virtual PC 2007 download:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=04D26402-3199-48A3-AFA2-2DC0B40A73B6&displaylang=en

And if it's needed, the Virtual PC 2004 SP1 download:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6d58729d-dfa8-40bf-afaf-20bcb7f01cd1&DisplayLang=en

Many people seem to have a hard time finding a good procedure to migrate unit test from nUnit to VSTS so I thought I'd post the way I'd make the conversion.

Jim Newkirk has created a conversion tool that's available at http://www.gotdotnet.com/workspaces/workspace.aspx?id=91936c5e-461f-4027-bdba-8a46f52fefdb.

Personally I prefer to do the conversion by hand (not a lot of work anyway). Here's also a step-by-step guide for manually converting nUnit tests to a VSTS unit test project:

1. Add a reference to Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.UnitTestFramework.

2. Remove reference to nunit.framework.

3. Change the following namespace imports:

C#: Change using NUnit.Framework declaratives to using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting
VB: Change Imports NUnit.Framework declaratives to Imports Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting

4. Search and replace the following:

C#: [TestFixture] => [TestClass]
VB: <TestFixture()> => <TestClass()>

C#: [TestFixtureSetUp] => [ClassInitialize]
VB: <TestFixtureSetUp()> => <ClassInitialize()>

C#: [TestFixtureTearDown] => [ClassCleanup]
VB: <TestFixtureTearDown()> => <ClassCleanup()>

C#: [SetUp] => [TestInitialize]
VB: <SetUp()> => <TestInitialize()>

C#: [TearDown] => [TestCleanup]
VB: <TearDown()> => <TestCleanup()>

C#: [Test] => [TestMethod]
VB: <Test()> => <TestMethod()>

Assert.Ignore => Assert.Inconclusive

5. Open the Visual Studio project file in Xml (using Open As... in Visual Studio or use Notepad) and add the following to the msbuild script:

Paste the following line in the <PropertyGroup> that contains <AssemblyName> and other properties:

C#: <ProjectTypeGuids>{3AC096D0-A1C2-E12C-1390-A8335801FDAB};{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}</ProjectTypeGuids>
VB: <ProjectTypeGuids>{3AC096D0-A1C2-E12C-1390-A8335801FDAB};{F184B08F-C81C-45F6-A57F-5ABD9991F28F}</ProjectTypeGuids>

This week I found myself wanting to look at the raw XML data sent between a client and a service. Of course the WCF tool SvcTraceViewer generally makes more sense to use for tracing, but sometimes it's necessary to look at the actual data on the wire. In such case a tcp trace tool can be used and placed in-between the caller and the service. In the end this was really easy to setup but in order to save someone else the hour or so to figure it out here's how it works:

For tracing I used Simon Fell's tcpTrace available at http://www.pocketsoap.com/tcptrace/.

First start tcpTrace. It needs to sit in the middle of the call so have it listen to the port the server exposes and forward to different port. Then configure the server to listen to the port tcpTrace forwards to using the listenUri configuration setting. The client doesn't have to be changed since all it does is call tcpTrace, which then forwards to the service. The config used looks like this: 

Server config:

<service name="Service.Calculator">
   <endpoint address="http://localhost:8001/CalculatorService"
                 listenUri="http://localhost:8002/CalculateService"
                 binding="basicHttpBinding"
                 contract="Service.ICalculator"         
   />
</service>

Client config:

   />
</client>

Note to self: Just to save the extra minutes to find the darn download - the VSTS Team Explorer can be downloaded here.